Whiplash

In Whiplash, the golden light of the Schaffer Conservatory brazens its students; they merge with their instruments between those cigar-box walls. Under the tutelage of Terrence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), the most demanding instructor at the world's most prestigious music school, these students aren't using tools to make art; they are tools for making art. Greatness doesn't mean interpreting music; it means playing the notes flawlessly. By using this definition, the film means to excuse its substitution of jazz for what we've come to associate, in movies, with sports: Whiplash is a crowd-pleaser, from high brow to low, because it takes the drive to win the championship game and moves the competition inward, into the consciousness of an artist whose form is as refined and esoteric as opera or ballet. Talent equals craft plus spite: a formulation that is as false as it is irresistible.

 

Damien Chazelle, the writer-director, probably couldn't have sold this notion so resonantly if Miles Teller's Andrew wasn't as convincingly an artist and asshole as Oscar Isaac's Llewyn Davis. A 19-year-old aspiring drummer, whose hero is Buddy Rich, Andrew whams on his instrument till the sticks shred his flesh; he takes five to submerge his hands in ice water, and watch the water turn red, before going back to whacking that elusive mole. When he's recruited into Fletcher's band, he becomes the star pupil—which means he receives the most abuse. A lagging tempo can make a chair go airborne; Fletcher isn't a teacher, he's a rabid drill sergeant who'll strike you, call you a fag, or threaten to fuck you like a pig. He beats perfection out of his students, and if you're a perfectionist like Andrew, he gets inside your head like an axe.

Simmons, buff and bald as a bullet, plays Fletcher con brio; having for years subsisted on being a droll presence who livened up movies as blah as Juno from the background, the actor has been overdue for a big part, and I'm happy to see him take center stage and amp his shtick up to 11. But it's a stunt role. Fletcher certainly believes in his, shall we say, tough-love philosophy, but Chazelle has made him intentionally impenetrable, so he's nothing except an idea and some swagger. It's Andrew who's observed in his natural habitat, and in the most revealing scene in the movie, he's away from his drum kit, having taken a girl on a date to a dinky delicatessen. She tells him that she studies at Fordham, where her major's undeclared; she's just figuring things out. To a degree that could land him on one spectrum or another, Andrew simply cannot empathize with her lack of clarity, can't identify with people who aren't interested only in the best for themselves and of themselves. His lust to be an immortal—a "great one"—is inhuman, but it's also the luxury that Chazelle indulges us in. And holds us with.

We don't see much of the protagonist's short-lived fling, and this is for the best. Besides drumming, and the occasional repertory film he sees with his father, what else could Andrew have to talk about? His passion is as narrow and mysterious as that of ballet dancers who choose their profession before puberty; he's at the age when most people are coming into their own in a widening world, and he's a friendless ascetic in an art form that's struggling to survive in the margins. Neither this dire fact nor the possibility that jazz might need to evolve beyond Fletcher's limited precepts occurs to him. (Maybe Whiplash itself is just that out of touch—or maybe it's just shameless. In the most misbegotten scene, Andrew's achievements are overlooked at a dinner party in favor of those of the host's jock son. The implication seems to be that New York intellectuals value football over Lincoln Center.) Andrew has a snide hauteur, and unaccounted-for scars on his face, as well as some all-too-accounted-for scars on his soul like an M.I.A. mom and a failed-novelist dad. Thankfully, Teller's glare transcends the hackiness.

As much as I found the film pleasurable and involving, it's also a minefield of cheap tricks. It's the kind of movie that gazes up at skyscrapers to tell us we've hit the big time—or are, at least, bearing witness to the big time, like rubbernecked tourists in Times Square. It's about the New York that Taylor Swift is welcome in. When a bus to an important concert gets delayed by a flat tire, Andrew is the only musician in his band riding it. When he drops sheet music on a chair to grab a soda, it's pilfered in under a second. (It seemed obvious that Fletcher had instigated the theft as one of his mind games, but this is never addressed.) When you see a passenger-seat view of Teller driving in a rush, yammering on the phone, you wait for the truck to come and T-bone him. And, in the last analysis, by defying his teacher's torments, Andrew can only vindicate them; he reveals himself to be the genius that Fletcher always knew him to be. (Torture-affirming tautologies are a messy business.) But to reject this story solely on the grounds of its clichés would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A cheesy soap opera needs some froth, and Chazelle blows bubbles in style.